Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In
h e Concrete Dragon,
the planning historian h omas Campanella dis-
cusses how contemporary Chinese cities are remaking themselves in six
ways: speed, scale, spectacle, sprawl, segregation, and sustainability. He
regards the fi rst fi ve in decidedly ambivalent terms but he holds out sustain-
ability, represented by Dongtan, as an optimistic coda. He was not alone in
believing that Dongtan might improve on existing Chinese urban develop-
ment policy and practice. Unfortunately, Dongtan's realities have not lived
up to the hopes and dreams of its boosters. What Campanella and others
could not (or would not) see was that Dongtan itself was not the antidote to
the problems of urban development in China but rather their culmination.
Despite the ubiquity of the bird pictures on Chongming Island, Dongtan
eco-city is decidedly not driven by bird-lovers (domestic and otherwise),
who would by and large prefer no development so as to preserve the unique
wetland habitat. Bird-lovers rarely dictate land-use policy and practice.
Dongtan is, fi rst and foremost, a political and economic development project
in which the client, the engineers, the architects, and the politicians (on the
island, in Shanghai and Beijing, and abroad) have fi nancial stakes and larger
goals that sometimes confl ict and other times mesh.
h is chapter discusses the rhetoric and promise of Dongtan and its ulti-
mate failure. Dongtan rose from nothing, reached a political peak, and ulti-
mately was never built. Why and how did Dongtan boosters think this eco-
city project on this island ever made sense? What are the geopolitical fears
and desires that infl uenced the project? What were the cultural and ideo-
logical roots of Dongtan and the many reasons for its ultimate failure? Does
it have an afterlife? What were—or are—the culture and politics at work in
Dongtan? Why was so much invested (both literally and ideologically) in the
dream of Dongtan eco-city? In part, the answers stem from Chongming's
status as an “eco-island” and Dongtan's as an “eco-city,” refl ecting the
desire to identify and concentrate “ecological places” as the solution to bur-
geoning environmental and climate crises. h
is ideological construction of
